Cabbage White
Pieris rapae
Cabbage White · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 12 July 2026
A male Cabbage White in flight over mountain mint at the Botanic Garden, the proboscis still coiled. Introduced to North America near Quebec in the 1860s and now one of the commonest butterflies on the continent, which is a polite way of saying it is the butterfly whose caterpillars eat your brassicas.
One black spot on the forewing makes this a male; females carry two. The flight looks erratic and fluttery, but it is doing something specific: a searching pattern, quartering low over vegetation, and the same species has been shown to see ultraviolet marks on the females that we cannot.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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